Thursday, Aug. 26, 2021 | 2 a.m.
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On behalf of Friends of Nevada Wilderness, I’d like to thank Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto for her leadership in battling climate change and drought. In her recent op-ed, she talked about the resiliency of Southern Nevadans and the innovative ways in which we’ve conserved water to accommodate population growth.
That combination of leadership, innovation and resiliency will continue to serve us well as we strive to grow sustainably into the future.
At Friends, we encourage our members and supporters to engage in the public process that leads to decisions that affect us all. Many Southern Nevadans have raised their voices over time, and we hope that even more people will get involved in the discussion of how we grow so that quality of life can improve for all of us, regardless of what part of the city or suburbs we live in.
The Southern Nevada Economic Development and Conservation Act, or SNEDCA, includes sections that designate about 1.6 million acres of new Wilderness Areas, including much of our beloved Desert National Wildlife Refuge. Friends has worked on such a designation for years, so we are ecstatic that it could actually become official sometime soon.
Thanks to Cortez Masto, SNEDCA also contains new tools for combating climate change, tools that will work if the public engages with our local elected officials to make decisions that work for us all.
And the bipartisan infrastructure bill includes significant new resources for a major water recycling project, also thanks to the senator.
Some decisions will be difficult to make, but with the right leadership, a community that seeks innovation, and the resiliency of us desert-dwellers, we can all thrive on into the future.
The writer is the Southern Nevada director of Friends of Nevada Wilderness
